"9/29" opens with a claustrophobic description of a ship's state room:
My bed is narrow
in a small room
at sea
The numbers are on
the wall
Arabic I
Berth No. 2
was empty above me
the steward
took it apart
and removed
it
only the number
remains
·2·
The numbers on the wall, grown magnified under a completely involved attention, especially shrink the sense of space, as does the contracting three-line stanza itself. Together, they confirm the equivalently heightened sense of time that the date/title suggests. But even out of this neurotic state, the concrete beauty of the number plaque manages to assert itself:
on an oval disc
of celluloid
tacked
to the white enameled
woodwork
with
two bright nails
like stars
beside
the moon
Thus, the sequence begins with an intensely alive sensibility under siege, in retreat. "10/10" and "10/21 (the orange flames)" continue this remarkable complex of beauty and stress while shifting the emphasis a bit. Rather than the fugitive beauty of the number plaque at the end of "9/29," we encounter as foremost in "10/ 10" the beauty of a vividly colored flower:
Monday
the canna flaunts
its crimson head
But as the overly time-conscious notation of the day perhaps suggests, this flower, especially its thrice repeated color, is languishing:
Crimson lying folded
crisply down upon
the invisible
darkly crimson heart
of the poor yard--
the grass is long
October tenth
1927
The entire affective state here might best be termed neurasthenic, and indeed the paradoxical coupling of a heightened sense of the immediate moment with the near amnesia of longer periods (such as those insinuated by the unmentioned intervals between poems/entries) is a classical symptom of clinical neurasthenia. So is the depressive fascination with a fire in "10/21 (the orange flames)" (explicitly identified in other printings of the poem as a rubbish fire). An entire nine-line, blockish stanza pensively mulls over the color and motion of the blaze:
the orange flames
stream horizontal, windblown
they parallel the ground
waving up and down
the flamepoints alternating
the body streaked with loops
and purple stains while
the pale smoke, above,
continues steadily eastward--
Then in the second stanza it turns into an equally obsessive and now explicit grouse about the infirmities of old age:
What chance have the old?
There are no duties for them
no places where they may sit.
Their knowledge is laughed at
they cannot see, they cannot hear.
And on for eight more lines--"Their feet hurt, they are weak / they should not have to suffer"--until the speaker pathetically insists, "there should be a truce for them."
[. . .]
This same imaginative vitality then takes the theme of cultural ineffectuality and translates it into the paradoxically vivid Gerontion-like doldrums of "10/28 (On hot days)":
On hot days
the sewing machine
whirling
in the next room
in the kitchen
and men at the bar
talking of the strike
and cash
The relationship here between the elements of beauty and those of enervation is almost the exact inverse of the earlier "10/10." There, the literally beautiful canna seemed overwhelmed by a languorous affect; here the denoted lethargy seems buoyed by the beauty of the vivid physical impression, especially of the "whirling" sewing machine. We sense, then, that a certain equilibrium has been attained in this season of "descent"--exactly at its middle poem/date. Sustaining beauty is no longer the fugitive presence at the end of a poem, as it was in "9/29"; it is now the very substance of the entries.
And so, when "10/29" picks up the motif of class conflict from "10/28 (On hot days)" ("talking of the strike"), it parlays it into a forthright manifesto of the ascendant sensibility's own redemptive aesthetic:
The justice of poverty
its shame its dirt
are one with the meanness
of love
Its organ in a tarpaulin
the green birds
the fat, sleepy horse
the old men
The precise details and vivid language of the second stanza are now aligned with the affirmation of the literal statement in the first, and the sense of confident consolidation is further reinforced by the first appearance since the opening poem of a visually regular stanza. This time, however, the more balanced quatrains stand in exact contrast to the shrinking triplets of "9/29." Everything serves to save from idiocy the detailed spectacle of a genuine human effort at enacted beauty:
The grinder sourfaced
hat over eyes
the beggar smiling all open
the lantern out
And the popular tunes--
sold to the least bidder
for a nickel
two cents or
nothing at all
or even
against the desire
forced on us
The final stanza, especially its last line, neatly suggests the incipient boldness of which even the hurdy-gurdy's necessarily minimal aestheticism proves capable. In "11/1," that boldness grows more plainly robust. There is a literally comic expansion of scene that sharply contrasts with the claustrophobic interior of the opening "9/29," and the grotesque gigantism of the decor in that poem also contrasts with the naturally large embroidery which some meadow reeds create on the night's horizon:
The moon, the dried weeds
and the Pleiades--
Seven feet tall
the dark, dried weedstalks
make a part of the night--
a red lace
on the blue milky sky
Within this idyllic enlargement of view and feeling, there is the sudden ejaculation of a creative imperative--"Write"--followed immediately by an abrupt contraction of the visual field:
Write--
by a small lamp
Then, the sudden sense of getting down to business expands into a deliberation upon the relative effects to be had with different measures of illumination; and the "small lamp" of the previous stanza retroactively acquires an ironic inadequacy as it pales in the presence of two immensely healthy boys revealed by the greater illumination of a billboard:
the Pleiades are almost
nameless
and the moon is tilted
and halfgone
And in runningpants and
with ecstatic aesthetic faces
on the illumined
signboard are leaping
over printed hurdles and
"1/4 of their energy comes
from bread"
two gigantic highschool boys
ten feet tall
These two bounding youths with their "aesthetic faces" appear as something like the champions of both their own printed legend ("1/4 of their energy. . .") and the imaginative initiative which that very script and their own image represent. However commercial the billboard's origin, its reality is an exuberantly, gigantically aesthetic one.
Indeed, the boys are rather effective champions, for they and their slogan prepare us exactly for the appearance of an equally expansive title at the head of the next day's entry:
11/2 A MORNING IMAGINATION OF RUSSIA
One can almost see the unending Asiatic steppes at sunrise! The entry itself is just as expansive. In full proselike lines and at relatively huge length (the poem is over three full pages), a speaker opens the "IMAGINATION" by first translating the exterior immensity of the boys into a more subjective awakening and amplification of spirit:
The earth and the sky were very close
When the sun rose it rose in his heart
It bathed the red cold world of
the dawn so that the chill was his own
This sense of inner expansion immediately defines itself as part of the sequence's established lyrical emergence out of the fact of seasonal distress and into the mitigating beauty of its very wreckage:
The mists were sleep and sleep began
to fade from his eyes. Below him in the
garden a few flowers were lying forward
on the intense green grass where
in the opalescent shadows oak leaves
were pressed hard down upon it in patches
by the night rain. There were no cities
The brilliant colors especially recall and confirm the sensory boldness that had persisted in the crimson canna and whirling sewing machine of "10/10" and "10/28 (On hot days)." Then with hardly a pause, the speaker deploys the vaguely proletarian suggestions of the title, and constructs a broad cultural perspective that will incorporate the opening sense of personal liberation and govern the rest of the poem:
. . .There were no cities
between him and his desires
His hatreds and his loves were without walls
without rooms, without elevators
without files, delays of veiled murderers
muffled thieves, the tailings of
tedious, dead pavements, the walls
against desire save only for him who can pay
high. There were no cities--he was
without money--
Thus, the first stanza. Out of the opening claustrophobic, shipboard passage of "9/29," we have finally arrived in a newly liberated, revolutionary country. Here the decadent titillation of urban wealth is swept away by the restored delights of a peasant pleasure in the natural world:
Cities are full of light, fine clothes
delicacies for the table, variety,
novelty--fashion: all spent for this.
Never to be like that again--
the frame that was. It tickled his
imagination. But it passed in a rising calm
Tan dar a dei! Tan dar a dei!
He was singing. Two miserable peasants
very lazy and foolish
seemed to have walked out from his own
feet and were walking away
with wooden rakes
under the six nearly bare poplars, up the hill
The objective credibility of this proletarian utopia may, of course, be unconvincing. But the envisioning of it is a powerful projection of the imaginative strength that has literally been awakened in the sequence. In place, for instance, of the morose brooding over the fire in "10/21 (the orange flames)," we now have a whimsical moment of distraction that attaches the central sensibility to a whole new world order:
There go my feet.
He stood still in the window forgetting
to shave--
The very old past was refound
redirected. It had wandered into himself
And there is an equally refreshing moment a few lines later as the speaker nobly resolves to himself
... He would go
out to pick herbs, he graduate of
the old university. He would go out
and ask that old woman, in the little
village by the lake, to show him wild
ginger. He himself would not know the plant.
It is with this lyrical, not political authority that our hero can convincingly conceive of himself with even a literally astronomical exaggeration:
Nothing between now.
He would go to the soviet unshaven. This
was the day--and listen. Listen. That
was all he did, listen to them, weigh
for them. He was turning into
a pair of scales, the scales in the
zodiac.
This is not megalomania; it is simply the commensurate response to the claustrophobia and cosmic shrinkage with which the entire sequence had begun--to the "two bright nails / like stars / beside."
Given the extreme nature of the antithetical states involved here, it is probably equally inevitable that a certain siege mentality persist even beyond what appears to be something of a successful resolution for the sequence, as is in fact the case. Even amidst the revolutionary pride at discharging his own menial duties, the hero of this daydream cannot help but worry with paranoia:
He took a small pair of scissors
from the shelf and clipped his nails
carefully. He himself served the fire.
We have cut out the cancer but
who knows? perhaps the patient will die.
The patient is anybody, anything
worthless that I desire--my hands
to have it--instead of the feeling
that there is a piece of glazed paper
between me and the paper--invisible
but tough running through the legal
processes of possession--a city, that
we could possess--
It's in art, it's in
the French school.
"It's in art, it's in / the French school"--at once the alarm is the very height of a psychological hysteria and an aesthetic certitude; it is art in profound resistance to the forces of life which ennervate and denude the imagination. It is finally in these terms that the sprawling "A MORNING IMAGINATION OF RUSSIA" concludes.
Intensely aware of the precariously minimal nature of his revolutionary aesthetic advances, the speaker manages nonetheless to muster a heartening camaraderie with which to affirm the sustaining value of those efforts:
We have little now but
we have that. We are convalescents. Very
feeble. Our hands shake. We need a
transfusion. No one will give it to us,
they are afraid of infection. I do not
blame them. We have paid heavily. But we
have got--touch. The eyes and the ears
down on it. Close.
|
From The Lost Works of William Carlos Williams: The Volumes of Collected Poetry as Lyrical Sequences. Copyright © 1995 by Associated University Presses.